How can I manage non ISO-8859-1 characters passing on the URL?

by Laura Cigardi
5,929 views Published on Oct 24, 2011
Applies to: All versions
Table of contents

Tomcat Application Server is able to manage by default all the ISO-8859-1 characters to encode URIs.

If your Application uses characters that does not belong to this character set, you have to configure the Application Server or your Application in order to correctly manage them.

If not configured, the Application Server does not recognize those types of characters passing on the URL. Therefore, you can get unexpected results in your Application.

To better understand what character encoding is and to find out which is the character set you need to use for your Application, you can look at this page: Character encoding

You can choose to configure your WebRatio Application or to directly configure the Application Server.

Configure the WebRatio Application

  • Choose the Project tab from your Web Project Editor.
  • In the Properties View check the "Use Default URL Encoding" property. Then write into the "Default Server Encoding" property the character set that the server is using for this application (ISO-8859-1, Windows-1250, and so on). For instance the Tomcat release included with WebRatio uses the ISO-8859-1 encoding.
  • Generate the Web Project.

Configure Tomcat (from version 5.5)

  • Modify the "server.xml" file placed under the directory $CATALINA_HOME/conf adding the attribute URIEncoding to the <Connector> node related to the port used by the Application Server (usually this port is the 8080). For instance the UTF-8 encoding can be specified with the following attribute:
    
    URIEncoding="UTF-8" 
    If not specified, ISO-8859-1 is used.
  • Restart your Tomcat Application server to apply changes.